Page 733 - A New Horse

Author Notes:

Guest Author's Note: "This eclectic cast are the not-exactly-heroes of my own comic, Star Mares, a ponified original Star Wars trilogy told from the perspective of a random assortment of background ponies.

"I figured that 'bizarre collection of individuals blundering their way through the edges of canon' translates pretty well to 'the players made their characters without consideration for party balance and especially for what the GM actually planned to run' (which, frankly, is every campaign I’ve ever run or played in a nutshell).

"While the characters in question weren't specifically intended to reflect the Mane Six like this, I tried to match them as well as I could to these players' style.

"If you'd like to see where everything goes from here (albeit just as a regular story, rather than Darths and Droids with ponies) you can find it at christhes.deviantart.com/art/Star-Mares-1-1-Cover-558205382 - as of this writing, the entirety of Episode IV has been completed, with more to come."

Reminds me of an old D&D game my group played in before I joined up with them. They called it the Company of the White Rose, and were a Krynn adventuring group accidentally transplanted into the Forgotten Realms.

There's this wonderful moment they occasionally draw attention to, when they were advancing on a small hamlet which had been terrorized by undead. As the PC's walk past a group of dispirited villagers leaving town with all they can carry, someone runs up to them and shouts, "Run for your lives! The Liches are killing everyone!"

The PC's look at the villager and ask, "How many liches?"

The villager gapes and blinks a few times. "Who knows. We didn't stop to count them. We run from liches, thank you!"

The group sort of looked at each other, and in stereo, replied, "Not us."

What's with them and earth ponies? Well maybe they're using my D&D 5e pony races. Earth ponies there are set up like variant humans with the free bonus feat at 1st. I've noticed *SO* many optimization threads mention that as the best racial pick and have seen countless hourserulings to remove variant humans as a choice. Balderdash I say!

Today is the earth pony day to shine and be best pony! :D I have more earth pony characters than any other race in RPGs. One recently "got the girl" too at the end! Yay! :D

Not bad, though I see what looks like a typo in the diamond dog section: "Those less than two size categories smaller than you must crawl through the passage." Wouldn't smaller or equal sized creatures be able to walk just fine, and creatures one size category larger need to crawl? (Two size categories higher, and they can't go through.)

Also, changelings feed on love; that's not just HP recovery. You might want to have some rule ("ribbon", as the D&D 5E authors put it: something that doesn't directly affect combat or other encounters) that changelings don't need to eat if they are near a sufficient source of love (maybe not needing to consume rations as part of a long rest if they've love siphoned after their most recently completed long rest).

I think it's less a typo and more just not communicating the idea. What it meant was tat if someone crawling through your tunnel is one size category smaller than you or bigger than that, then it has to crawl through your tunnel. I could edit the wording.

It needs an edit. You'll also want to specify the maximum. Do I understand the following to be correct?

If you're Medium (as diamond dogs are by default), Small or Medium needs to crawl to get through your tunnel (does that include you?), while Tiny or smaller can just walk. Can Large crawl through, or is that too large to fit? What about Huge? Presumably Gargantuan is too large.

If that's all true and Large is too big, then I'd suggest this wording in place of "Those less than two size categories smaller than you must crawl through the passage.":

Anything of a larger size category than you can not fit in the passage. Anything other than you of your same size category or one smaller must crawl to fit through the passage. Anything two or more size categories smaller than you can walk through the passage. Should it matter, the entrance to the passage, and any cross-section thereof, is one size category smaller than you (although you can partially collapse any part you move through to make it smaller).

You'll want to also mention that creatures can normally crawl through tunnels the same size they are. (Since there will be many cases where a PC diamond dog digs a tunnel intending for the rest of the party to travel through as well.)

Especially amusing given later events.
Though there are SEVERAL plot points that'd be hard to explain if it really was the same players.

But what is it with RD and being widely known as a traitor?
A certain other, slightly more known, fic has her be widely known for ditching her people too!
And then there's the show itself, where her 'discording' involves her ditching them.
Seriously, it seems RD can only be evil/bad/whatever in one way; Going 'screw this, I'm out!' and ditching her friends and allies.

I have no idea if this is the right place for me to share this, and no it isn't an april fool's joke as near as I can tell.
https://youtu.be/hdLf27704FQ?t=42m2s
http://riverhorse.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/2297e6bc-9e5f-4fb4-8f92-e21cbd48532e-1030x320.png
the publishing company Riverhorse will be doing an official licensed My Little Pony RPG

the video is a brief look at how things will work, and the image is all the site has for the game so far.

Somewhere on G+ I mentioned how depressing it was that on the Equestria Daily post, half the comments were "what console is it for?"

Otherwise, I think the stunning lack of enthusiasm may be due to the fact that there are already some perfectly good fan-made pony RPGs out there (heck, I learned to do pony art myself specifically so I wouldn't have to pay someone to illustrate mine), so the only thing an official one has going for it is the Hasbro stamp on the cover (or the box, as the case may be).

I myself made a little presentation (for last year's Everfree Northwest) on the frankly ABSURD number of pony RPGs there are out there.

So my reaction to this news boils down to: "Oh, another one for the pile. At least there's money behind this one, which possibly means more man-hours spent balancing and creating content and GM tools. That'd be more than a lot of the homebrews can say."

Balancing pony races seems to be something a lot of the gaming fandom doesn't grasp well. Understandably as you have an inherently flying race (powerful ability), an inherently magical race (powerful ability) and then Earth ponies(what do they do?). XD

In the Fallout campaign I'm part of, flying is probably the single best advantage in the game (making pegasi and griffons really good). We nearly had a player killed because an NPC flyer decided to hide in the clouds with a sniper rifle! (o_o); Unicorns can pick from some pretty good magic abilities (teleport and healing being some of the best IMHO). And earth ponies... get to pick a bonus perk every 5 levels. But it has to be a perk with a level no greater than half the earth pony's level. And they have to meet the prerequisites. Not as useful as one imagines (especially when half the earth pony perks are cybernetics and GMs seem to not like an earth pony suddenly becoming a cyborg without any in-character reason for it). So yeah, its a tough lot to balance.

I'm used to changing games a lot, so I've gotten good at making up characters on the spot if I need to. While I don't usually make an alt character for one game, I have gotten in the habit of carrying all of my characters in one handy binder just in case we decide to switch games again. So who knows? I might pull what AJ did here one of these days. I definitely have the resources and skill to pull it off if the need ever arises.

I've personally never made a backup character for any game beforehand (except in cases when I'm actually planning to change characters), but for most of the rest of my group it's standard operating procedure.

Of course, considering that in the very first session I played with them (playing Deadlands: Hell on Earth) the renegade doomsayer PC nearly nuked the entire party...

This sounds like how my game store group gets their characters set up usually. Character creation always felt so haphazardly put together that it amazes me that we would still somehow manage to cover all of our bases in-spite of it all.

My current group for Dark Heresy 2E in particular, we have the one player that will always play an assassin in any sci-fi setting, another player who decided to play as a psyker because he had never done so before, and then there's the player who went out of his way to make sure that he couldn't be the leader of the group by playing a mutant. Which left my sanctioned heretek pulling triple duty as our group's leader, medic, and royal smart person. Essentially, we somehow made a party of Inquisitor Acolytes that consisted of people that the Imperium would like to just "disappear".

To make matters worse, one of my orders got our mutant killed. So that player decided to just randomly roll dice and let them decide what his new character would be this time around. He ended up rolling a character that is now our face and could easily be the leader of the group. I'm not sure if I should be thankful that he's still adamant on letting me keep the whole leadership position. Having gotten one party member killed and trying to cover up the fact that another might have some kind of daemon influence in him doesn't exactly scream "best leader ever!" now does it?

But hey, we're dealing with actual Lovecraftian cults in the grim dark future that is Warhammer 40k. It can't really get any worse than this, right?... Right??